Chick Defeats Picus in Fiercely Fought Contest : 3rd District: The councilwoman’s ex-aide successfully hammers home her ‘time-for-a-change’ theme.

Southwest San Fernando Valley voters, restive over rising crime and a stagnant economy, ousted 16-year incumbent Joy Picus from her Los Angeles City Council seat Tuesday, electing her former aide Laura Chick.

In substantial although still incomplete election returns, Chick held an apparently insurmountable lead over her former boss.

At her election night party in a 16th floor suite at the Warner Center Marriott, Chick was ecstatic. “It’s just too momentous,” she said, wiping tears from her eyes.

“People are not stupid and they are not fooled by the kind of political posturing and empty promises they’ve been getting,” Chick said as she acknowledged that her political fate was closely tied to that of mayoral candidate Richard Riordan, who also was doing well in early returns.

“The fact that Riordan was doing well in the 3rd District was a good omen for me,” Chick said.

About 25 people shared the suite with Chick and her husband Robert, an insurance executive, early in the evening. Another 300 Chick supporters, meanwhile, jammed into one of the hotel’s ballrooms.

“I think it was really clear in the primary when 63% of the voters voted against Joy Picus,” said Chick’s press secretary Jackie Brainard.

Picus’ political consultant Bill Carrick said he thought that “people in the district still really like Joy, but the idea of generic change is very attractive to them. We’re in a season where change is the political mantra.”

Entering the seven-week runoff campaign, Picus faced some grim political numbers: Nearly two-thirds of the electorate had voted against her in the primary and, in an unusual feat for a challenger, Chick matched Picus nearly dollar for dollar in fund raising.

Feeling the hot breath of her former aide on her neck, the incumbent lashed out at Chick in a campaign that came to be dominated by mutual negative politicking.

Picus accused her ex-aide of betrayal, likening Chick to an employee who steals the boss’ trade secrets and clients to set up her own business. And she blasted Chick as a carpetbagger because the challenger moved into the 3rd District only last year from Sherman Oaks.

Picus, whose campaign was run by consultant Bill Carrick, also tried to reverse the political images, painting Chick as the City Hall insider.

Picus tried to depict the challenger as the instrument of a well-connected status quo, pointing out that Chick’s husband, Robert Chick, was a former city airport commissioner appointed by Mayor Tom Bradley.

Picus alleged that Chick was a crony of Bradley and downtown insiders, contending that Chick’s fund-raising success was proof that the challenger was no political innocent.

“The only thing Laura Chick has changed is her address,” Picus said. “Laura Chick is no fresh face, she’s a political insider.”

Picus launched an all-out blitz in the last week of the campaign to win over an electorate concerned about crime and illegal immigration.

In five separate events that week, Picus stressed her fight against graffiti, domestic violence and speeders, showed up to observe a raid against illegal immigrant day laborers and highlighted her efforts to rid Lanark Park of drug dealers.

Top Los Angeles Police Department officers attended three of those events and praised Picus for her efforts, even as they denied that they did so to help Picus out of a political jam. Federal immigration officials denied that they timed their raid on a day-laborer hangout, a longtime annoyance to Woodland Hills residents, for Picus’ political benefit.

Chick hammered away at the time-for-a-change theme, pointing out in one campaign mailer, for example, that when Picus was first elected 16 years ago, Jimmy Carter was President and “Elvis Presley was still alive.”

Chick told audiences that she had moved to the Valley to seek good schools and quiet neighborhoods, free from congestion and crime. But that suburban tranquillity, Chick concluded, “is slipping through our fingers.”

Events and politics appeared to support Chick’s message.

In the Valley, mayoral candidate Richard Riordan’s anti-City Hall campaign amplified Chick’s own themes. Several highly publicized crimes, including the fatal shooting of a Reseda High School student on campus, added weight to Chick’s lament that the Valley was falling victim to urban ills.

Picus’ reelection task was complicated, too, when she opposed a measure on the April ballot to place term limits on City Hall’s elected officials and--on the same ballot--backed a measure to raise property taxes to pay for 1,000 more police officers. In both cases, the election returns showed Picus to be out of step with 3rd District voters.

Another Chick tactic was to paint Picus as ineffectual. It was on Picus’ watch that the Valley lost one of its two all-Valley school board seats, Chick reminded voters. And Chick said it was because of ineptitude and intransigence by Picus, who led the opposition to it, that the developers of Warner Ridge won the right to go forward with their controversial office project, virtually on their own terms.

Chick also displayed a strong drive to win, maintaining a rigorous schedule of precinct walking that was curtailed only in the last two weeks of the campaign by a congenital foot condition.

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